IN OUR ONGOING NATIONAL DEBATE about the use of human embryonic stem cells for research, there is one compromise position that reappears with regularity and attracts relatively wide support. This position proscribes (at least for federal funding) any research on stem cells derived from embryos produced solely for research purposes, while permitting research on stem cells derived from embryos that were produced but are no longer needed for use in infertility treatments. (I am not here referring to a different sort of compromise struck by President Bush in his speech of August 2001. He permitted funding for research on embryonic stem cell lines only if the evil deed of embryo destruction had already been done but not for cell lines derived from embryos destroyed in the future--thereby seeking to permit some research to go forward without providing an incentive for further destruction of embryos.) Because spare embryos are destined to be discarded in any case--because, that is, the decision of those with legal authority over the embryos has been to discard them--they have no future life prospects. They are destined to die, and the only question is how. Why not, one might wonder, gain some useful knowledge from their dying?

This compromise approach is not without appeal, and it has a distinguished pedigree. It was, for example, specifically endorsed by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission in its 1999 report on "Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research." The commission recommended that research on stem cells derived from spare embryos remaining after infertility treatments be eligible for federal funding but that, at least for the present, such funding not be permitted for research on stem cells derived from embryos that had been produced solely for research purposes.

This is a thoughtful compromise and in certain ways attractive. At the very least, it seems less crass than simply endorsing embryo research without limits. Perhaps some support the compromise solely for strategic reasons--as a first step but not, they hope, the last step in embryo research. But for others it may demonstrate a praiseworthy inclination to "shudder" just a bit in the face of a routinized use of nascent human life that any full-fledged program of embryo research would certainly involve. Nevertheless, appealing as this mediating position is in certain respects, we should not too quickly endorse it; for the pedigree of this sort of reasoning is actually more mixed and troubling than we usually realize. Consider the following three examples:

In the mid-1970s Congress established a National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. This commission, which proved to be fairly influential, examined and issued reports on a number of difficult topics in the ethics of human experimentation. The first of its reports, issued in 1975, was "Research on the Fetus." With certain safeguards, the commission was prepared to approve research on the fetus in utero and on the possibly viable infant outside the uterus, but if the research was not aimed at benefiting the research subject himself or herself, the commission required that it impose "minimal or no risk" or "no additional risk" to the well-being of the fetus or infant.
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